ISBN Hard Bop ( Jazz and Black Music 1955-1965 ) 224 pages English

Hard bop was a brand of post bebop jazz that enveloped many of the most talented American musicians in the period between 1955 and 1956. These were years unrivalled in jazz history for the number of musically brilliant records issued - including Art Blakey's Ugetsu Miles Davis's Kind of Blue Thelonius Monk's Brilliant Corners and Sonny Rollins's Saxophone Colossus. This is the first book devoted entirely to hard bop combining a narrative of the movement's evolution from its beginnings as an amalgam of bebop and R&B to its experimental breakthroughs in the 1960s. With close analyses of musicians' styles and recordings as well as specific tendencies within the school such as `soul jazz' it offers a much needed examination of the artists milieus and above all the sounds of one of America's greatest musical epochs.